This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
There are certain inherent conflicts between: (i) the goal of parties to maximize the value of data and their goal of respecting privacy rights of individuals; (ii) the goal of individuals' to protect their privacy rights and their goal of benefiting from highly personalized offerings; and (iii) the goal of U.S. and international government agencies to facilitate research and commerce and their goal of safeguarding rights of citizens.
One goal of non-healthcare-related parties is to reach the most “highly qualified” prospects, i.e., prospective buyers who have the requisite financial resources, motivation, and authority to make a purchase. Commercial parties will pay much more to reach qualified prospects than to reach undifferentiated prospects because the chances of consummating a transaction with a qualified prospect is significantly higher, given their interest, predisposition, and means to close transactions. The level of personalization/customization of offerings for prospective customers—which is directly related to the likelihood of consummating transactions—is enhanced by the depth and scope of information available about each individual prospect. One goal of healthcare-related parties is to conduct research pertaining to health and/or disease with the goal of advancing discoveries in applications that may improve human health.
The development, emergence and widespread adoption of computer networks, internets, intranets and supporting technologies has resulted in the wide-spread availability of cost-effective technology to collect, transmit, store, analyze and use information in electronic formats. As a result, entities now have the ability to readily collect and analyze vast amounts of information. This has created tensions between: (a) the increasing quantity of information available to qualify prospects, develop personalized/customized offerings for potential customers and/or conduct health-related or other research; and (b) decreasing security, anonymity and privacy for individuals who often are not aware of the existence of many data elements that may be traced back to them, and over which they often have little or no effective control.
Data elements may be collected both online and offline (both “born digital” and “born analog” and converted into digital format at a later date) through a variety of sources including, but not limited to, activity on social networking sites, electronic or digital records, emails, participation in rewards or bonus card programs that track purchases and locations, browsing or other activity on the Internet, and activity and purchases at brick-and-mortar stores and/or on e-commerce websites. Merchants, medical-related and other service providers, governments, and other entities use this tremendous amount of data that is collected, stored, and analyzed to suggest or find patterns and correlations and to draw useful conclusions. This data is sometimes referred to as “big data,” due to the extensive amount of information entities may now gather. With big data analytics, entities may now unlock and maximize the value of data—one example may involve non-health related entities engaging in behavioral marketing (with materials created for distribution being customized in an attempt to increase the correlation with the preferences pertaining to a particular recipient party) and another example may involve health-related entities accessing big data to conduct medical research. However, with behavioral marketing and big data analytics, related parties now have a much lower level of privacy and anonymity.
Attempts at reconciling the conflict between privacy/anonymity and value/personalization/research have often historically involved using alternative identifiers rather than real names or identifying information. However, these alternative identifiers are generally statically assigned and persist over time. Static identifiers are more easily tracked, identified, and cross-referenced to ascertain true identities, and may be used to ascertain additional data about subjects associated with data elements without the consent of related parties. Privacy and information experts have expressed concerns that re-identification techniques may be used with data associated with static identifiers and question whether data that is identifiable with specific computers, devices or activities (i.e., through associated static identifiers) can in practice be considered anonymous or maintained in a protected state of anonymity. When an identifier does not change over time, adversarial entities have unlimited time to accrete, analyze and associate additional or even exogenous data with the persistent identifier, and thus to determine the true identity of the subject and associate other data with the true identity. In addition, unlimited time provides adversarial entities with the opportunity to perform time-consuming brute-force attacks that can be used against any encrypted data.
According to a 2011 McKinsey Global Institute report:                A retailer using big data to the full extent could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent;        Harnessing big data in the public sector has enormous potential—if U.S. healthcare were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year—two-thirds of that would be in the form of reducing US healthcare expenditure by about 8 percent;        In the developed economies of Europe, government administrators could save more than €100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency improvements from using big data, not including using big data to reduce fraud and errors and boost the collection of tax revenues; and        Users of services enabled by personal-location enabled big data could capture $600 billion in consumer surplus.        
Many potential benefits from big data have not been fully realized due to ambiguity regarding ownership/usage rights of underlying data, tensions regarding privacy of underlying data, and consequences of inaccurate analysis due to erroneous data collected from secondary (versus primary) sources and/or inferred from activities of parties without active participation of, or verification by, said parties.
The recent explosion in popularity of decentralized networks or platforms (including permissionless systems and distributed ledger technologies, such as blockchain), including networks or platforms linked on a peer-to-peer basis or other non-centralized basis, has further increased the difficulty in maintaining a desired level of privacy/anonymity for users, while still allowing for the appropriate extraction of informational value and/or provision of personalized services by authorized third parties. In particular, due to the requirements of distributed ledger technologies with respect to immutability, auditability, and verification, it has heretofore been impossible to provide high levels of privacy/anonymity, at least because of the necessarily static nature of the information that is recorded in such distributed ledgers.
What are needed are systems, methods and devices that overcome the limitations of static and/or persistent privacy/anonymity and security systems and improve the accuracy of data for exchange, collection, transactions, analysis and other uses—especially in applications that store data in a decentralized fashion, e.g., using a distributed ledger technology, such as blockchain. Put another way, privacy/anonymity-enhancing technologies, such as those described herein, can help to reconcile the tensions between auditable and immutable information stores by providing tools that enable the ability of an authorized user to unlock the “true” meaning of such information, given a particular time and context.